Agnosticism IS the most dishonest position
February 14, 2020 at 5:13 pm
(This post was last modified: February 14, 2020 at 5:13 pm by R00tKiT.)
Hey there,
Non religious people tend to overly use words without thinking about them, just like many religious people do, only in a much more dishonest manner.
Let's take the motto "I believe in science" for example, which is, for most skeptics, a euphemism for "I don't believe in anything any religion claims". The latter declaration already contains a mistake since nobody exhausted all the religious claims and ensured that they're fake. Let's remember that atheists are perfectly fine with ruling out entire religions with guesswork and false stereotypes.
Fancy words like science, reason, etc. refer to a very simple idea : we struggle very hard to figure out how things work around us. We invented mathematics and fancy abstract concepts for the sole purpose of getting our thoughts straight. When our mathematics became good enough we were finally able to have a better intuition of the universe. What should be kept in mind here is that we didn't create anything, we adapted to an a priori existence, all our attempts in science are a posteriori explanations that we try to fit to what we see around us. It's easy to imagine a very clever alien figuring out our entire "glories" of science in a couple of hours, then coming with a working theory of everything in the next, but this very alien is clever enough not to mess with fundamentally different questions like a meaning of his existence , or disregard revelation without looking at it hard enough.
So the purpose of science is attempts to figure out a posteriori how stuff works. Religion is about wondering why there is an a priori to discover in the first place. These are two entirely distinct compartments. Huge advancements in one don't negate the importance of the other.
That's why people repeating the aforementioned motto are fundamentally dishonest, they equivocate and mix these two very different aspects of reality.
It's not hard to make a case that we will never access any kind of ultimate reality, we already know that we cannot ever predict a physical quanity of a particle with certainty [Uncertainty principle]. Yeah : predicting certainly anything about one particle anywhere in the universe is already inaccessible to us forever.
And let's not forget that it took us 1700+ years to prove pi is irrational. And some still say : I'm open minded about discovering God in the future
.
The only honest position is actually to take one of the two extremes. Saying that you're open to science discovering god is a grave misunderstanding of both science and religion.
Non religious people tend to overly use words without thinking about them, just like many religious people do, only in a much more dishonest manner.
Let's take the motto "I believe in science" for example, which is, for most skeptics, a euphemism for "I don't believe in anything any religion claims". The latter declaration already contains a mistake since nobody exhausted all the religious claims and ensured that they're fake. Let's remember that atheists are perfectly fine with ruling out entire religions with guesswork and false stereotypes.
Fancy words like science, reason, etc. refer to a very simple idea : we struggle very hard to figure out how things work around us. We invented mathematics and fancy abstract concepts for the sole purpose of getting our thoughts straight. When our mathematics became good enough we were finally able to have a better intuition of the universe. What should be kept in mind here is that we didn't create anything, we adapted to an a priori existence, all our attempts in science are a posteriori explanations that we try to fit to what we see around us. It's easy to imagine a very clever alien figuring out our entire "glories" of science in a couple of hours, then coming with a working theory of everything in the next, but this very alien is clever enough not to mess with fundamentally different questions like a meaning of his existence , or disregard revelation without looking at it hard enough.
So the purpose of science is attempts to figure out a posteriori how stuff works. Religion is about wondering why there is an a priori to discover in the first place. These are two entirely distinct compartments. Huge advancements in one don't negate the importance of the other.
That's why people repeating the aforementioned motto are fundamentally dishonest, they equivocate and mix these two very different aspects of reality.
It's not hard to make a case that we will never access any kind of ultimate reality, we already know that we cannot ever predict a physical quanity of a particle with certainty [Uncertainty principle]. Yeah : predicting certainly anything about one particle anywhere in the universe is already inaccessible to us forever.
And let's not forget that it took us 1700+ years to prove pi is irrational. And some still say : I'm open minded about discovering God in the future
.The only honest position is actually to take one of the two extremes. Saying that you're open to science discovering god is a grave misunderstanding of both science and religion.
